Response from Find My Past re Newspapers

A marketing person from Find My Past found my blog a couple of days ago and emailed me to ask if I wanted to be sent some blogger specific updates about their new resources, I replied in the affirmative as it might be useful (and wasn't going to cost anything!) and while I was writing I asked (again!) about the search funtionality regarding their new Newspaper collection.  You will find my original blog on this topic here.  I have not, to date, received any response to my initial query.

This was the marketing person's reply (I couldn't determine their gender from their name, hence my rather stilted references, sorry):

"I can answer that one definitely, basically as we’ve got to re-engineer everything to fit into our own site and platform we pretty much have to rebuild everything from scratch – We’ve made great strides in the newspapers since they’ve first gone on line at FMP but I agree there’s still a lot still to be done. It’s just quite a resource and we figured that giving people access to something usable but not perfect rather than hold off until things were as good as they were going to get was preferable. We’re definitely rebuilding and developing all the time. We’ve got some great functionality on the way, such as search results through the main “search all” for newspapers with your birth and death dates and already those searches are more accurate than they were and have added ability to refine results."

So, it's just a matter of waiting then, but who knows for how long?

Meanwhile today I'm at my mum's again and have been tracking down yet another of our Master Mariner ancestors (well, ancestors' relatives) Robert Nesbitt Hutton.  It's a good job they went in for naming their children with surnames for middle names or I wouldn't be able to keep all these sailor Robert Hutton's straight in my head.

This time he's the captain of a steam ship, and seems to have a proclivity for bumping into things and the occasional dramatic rescue.  He married the daughter of a local artist, Mark Thompson (1812-1875), and that has set me off on another tangent (as you do) looking at paintings on the BBC arts website and various auction sites. 

Opening of the South Dock Sunderland - painted 1853
(c) Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Lovely isn't it - and somehow even more so when you can say that your first cousin 4x removed wife's father painted it.  (Or not, if you're not as sad about these things as I am!)